Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Friday, April 14, 2006

On 1st April I did a piece on "environmentalist" predictions of catastrophe in which I admitted shortage of time had prevented me going in depth into the predictions that had been made of doom & destruction. This via Junkscience updates it:

April 26 marks the 20th anniversary of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Anti-nuclear activists are still trying to turn Chernobyl into a bigger disaster than it really was.

Although the Number Four nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded just before dawn on April 26, 1986, Soviet secrecy prevented the world from learning about the accident for days. Once details began to emerge, however, the anti-nuclear scare machine swung into action.

Three days after the accident Greenpeace scientists predicted the accident would cause 10,000 people to get cancer over a 20-year period within a 625-mile radius of the plant. Greenpeace also estimated that 2,000 to 4,000 people in Sweden would develop cancer over a 30-year period from the radioactive fallout.

At the same time, Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of the anti-nuclear Physicians for Social Responsibility, predicted the accident would cause almost 300,000 cancers in 5 to 50 years and cause almost 1 million people either to be rendered sterile or mentally retarded, or to develop radiation sickness, menstrual problems and other health problems.

University of California-Berkeley medical physicist and nuclear power critic Dr. John Gofman made the most dire forecast. He predicted at an American Chemical Society meeting that the Chernobyl accident would cause 1 million cancers worldwide, half of them fatal. Greenpeace have never apologised for the claim of 2,000 dead in Sweden so nobody can honestly deny the standard of honesty of that organisation is less than 1 in 2,000. The equivalent applies to Physicians for Lies....................In a similar spirit BBC Radio Scotland today said the "Sir David King, the government's chief science advisor had given his strongest warning yet that we are headed for a 3 degree warming". Since Sir David claimed in 2004 that temperatures were going up so fast that by 2100 the only inhabitable continent would be Antarctica (as favourably reported by the Indie) he has clearly backed off by several dozen degrees from this rather stronger warning. I emailed the BBC to say that they should correct this untrue story. On the following news programme they dropped (but obviously did not correct) the words "strongest warning" & carried a long interview with the boss of Scottish Renewables who, impartially, reported that windfarms are a wonderful & popular thing much better than nuclear. Naturally the BBC still refuse to give airtime to spokespeople from SONE or any other unambiguously pro-nuclear body.

Your links to the Fox story are broken but, shucks, it’s easy to find. It seems the story is a wee bit more complex than Fox state. This (edited) from the BBC at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4917526.stm

Greenpeace rejects Chernobyl toll

Greenpeace says in a report released on Tuesday that recent studies estimate that the actual number of such deaths will be 93,000...

Stressing that there is a problem with diagnosis, it adds that other illnesses could take the toll to 200,000.

"Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases," Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte told Reuters news agency.

"The only methodology that is accepted is for calculating fatal cancers."… The UN figure - of between 4,000 and 9,000 extra cancer deaths - came from a report released last October by the UN-led Chernobyl Forum…

Doctor Oxana Lozova, who works at a children's hospital in Rivne district, 300km (190 miles) west of Chernobyl, said many generations appeared to be affected.

"I think the fallout from Chernobyl has affected the immunity of those who were young children at the time of the disaster," she told the BBC's Moscow correspondent, Damian Grammaticas.

"We now have to deal with people who are a lot weaker than their fathers and grandfathers were.

"They're falling ill at an age when they really should still be quite fit."

'Apples and oranges'

The WHO said comparing the Chernobyl Forum and Greenpeace reports was like "comparing apples and oranges" when it spoke to the BBC News website.

"The Greenpeace report is looking at all of Europe, whereas our report looks at only the most affected areas of the three most affected countries," said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl.

"The WHO felt it had recourse to the best national and international scientific evidence and studies when it came up with its estimates of [up to] 9,000 excess deaths for the most affected areas. We feel they're very sound."

Mr Hartl rejected accusations of bias toward the nuclear industry in the report.

"We acting as [neither] an apologist or an attacker of the nuclear industry," he said.

The original report found more than 600,000 people received high levels of exposure, including reactor staff, emergency and recovery personnel and residents of the nearby areas.

So Fox has not reflected the difference in geography and methodology which makes the Greenpeace case a bit more sensible. I am not quite clear what you are saying anyway Mr. Craig. Do you consider that 9,000 deaths from one nuclear accident are acceptable?

Greenpeace's "research" is no such thing. They make an assumption that a certain number of cancers will take place. In fact this is merely an assumption for which they produce, & for which there is no evidence thus "Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases". In fact real research has been unable to find any statistical increase in cancers except in a small number of childhood leukemias.

The UN, which while overwhelmingly political has to keep at least one toe in reality has said 4,000. Greenpeace, which has no such constraints can & does produce any figure it wishes.

I could, were I so minded, assume that standing within 3 feet of an organic tomato would produce a 1 in 1,000 chance of death. i could then use it to "prove" that hundreds of millions of people have died of organic tomatoes using the methods of Greenpeace. If I changed it to GM tomatoes the BBC would probably report me as a scientist whose new research proves GM more dangerous than previously thought.

You can see from the remark you quoted "I think the fallout from Chernobyl has affected the immunity of those who were young children at the time of the disaster" that, because there is nno evidence of increased cancers over the first 20 years, that Greenpece are repositioning themselves so that they can continue with this nonsense, without producing any evidence, for the natural lives of those born at the time.

Nope, you just have not done your homework on this one. Apart from anything else the remarks about children you quote above were not from Greenpeace but from a discussion with a BBC reporter. Greenpeace have done some research and not just speculated about organic tomatoes. It is available here:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406

This report is their rebuttal to the International Atomic Energy Agency Chernobyl Forum report of September last year. They say “According to the IAEA "fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster," to date. The IAEA study does not cover all of the populations affected by Chernobyl fall-out but merely considers those who received a high radiation dose in the immediate wake of the accident - namely those 'liquidators' drafted in to carry out the immediate clean up of the site.” Greenpeace believes that any competent study would take into account those indirectly affected by fallout in the immediate area and in a wider geographical spread. Their report thus uses other research to examine these issues.

There are, indeed, several problems with the IAEA report. The role of the IAEA is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear power and in the report it has played down the number of deaths form the Chernobyl accident. Thus

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4922508.stm notes:

“A draft version of the UN's Chernobyl Forum last year suggested up to 4,000 deaths could be linked to the incident. But this figure was based on the 600,000 people exposed to high levels of radiation.

The full report suggested another 5,000 of the 6.8 million people exposed to lower levels would also die - but this figure did not appear in the 50-page executive summary. All of this data was from a 1996 study.

Explaining why the 4,000 figure was given prominence in the report, Melissa Fleming, a press officer for the International Atomic Energy Agency told [the magazine] Nature that it was to counter the much higher estimates which had previously been seen. "It was a bold action to put out a new figure that was much less than conventional wisdom." It is much lower than the 93,000 figure given by Greenpeace in its evaluation of the Chernobyl impact published this week. “

Nature agrees with this analysis at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7087/full/440982a.html

and also adds “The figures [in the IAEA report] come from a study published in 1996 by Elisabeth Cardis of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. "I was very shocked that they were quoting figures we had found ten years ago," says Cardis. "I didn't expect the numbers to be picked up and used in a press release without qualification."… Cardis is also about to publish a study of the pan-European impact. She concludes that, of 570 million people in Europe at the time, 16,000 will ultimately die as a result of the accident — 0.01% of all cancer deaths. But she says it will be virtually impossible to assess the ultimate death toll. Cancer causes about a quarter of all deaths in Europe, so weeding out those cases triggered by Chernobyl cannot be done with statistical confidence. "We'll never be able to say whether we were right or not," she says.”

Hence the problem of methodology, which is also addressed in the current issue of Nature but which is not available on the web. The BBC link above covers the article however and states that “writing in the journal, Dr Dillwyn Williams a thyroid cancer expert from Strangeways Research Laboratories, Cambridge, UK, and Dr Keith Baverstock, an environmental specialist from the University of Kuopio in Finland, said lessons could be learnt from history. They said the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the US was that 20 years is too soon to be able to predict all the consequences of fallout…There are already indications that the breast cancer rate in Gomel, Belarus, and other heavily contaminated areas, is double that which would be expected. Drs Williams and Baverstock add: "If a full, independent study of the consequences of the world's worst nuclear accident is not established, and its results not widely published for all to assess, wildly differing claims will continue, and public mistrust of the nuclear industry will grow further."”

So not even sources apparently sympathetic to the IAEA report are happy with it. A source unsympathetic to the nuclear industry but determined to get the figures correct writes at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1743406,00.html

“The charity I represent has been working in Belarus for 11 years, delivering humanitarian aid, training orphanage staff and foster families, and bringing children to the UK for recuperative holidays.

Regular visitors to Belarus cannot fail to be aware of the many health problems which, even today, seem to be more acute in the contaminated parts of the country. Twenty years on, young parents are giving birth to babies with disabilities or genetic disorders, or who develop serious diseases in their early months. But as far as we know, no research is being conducted into these issues.

Haematologists speak of blood disorders in children which are normally only seen in the elderly; heart disease and respiratory problems in children are widespread; osteoporosis is seen in small children; in the orphanages there are many children who do not grow, still looking like toddlers into their teens; babies are born with missing or twisted limbs; and breast cancer among young women is a major problem.

Thyroid cancer is the only illness which is indisputably linked to Chernobyl. There was a great deal of early scepticism, especially from US scientists, but eventually it could not be denied that the exponential rise in this normally rare disease could have only one cause.”

Greenpeace thus have legitimate concerns about the conclusions of the IAEA report but it seems that only more and better research can establish the true legacy of Chernobyl

Nope Greenpeace have not done any scientific research. They have trawled through some claims, some of them "not previously published in English" & made some totally unproven allegations.

Since the known death toll is under 50 To claim that the government funded IAEA are playing it down by claiming 4,000 is strange.

The best the anti-nukists can say of their claims is "We'll never be able to say whether we were right or not,", (as you quote with approval). In fact statistics is a more exact science than that & was able to detect a very small increase in Childdhood leukemias in Belarus.

Since many of the scare stories we are daily subjected to are based on fairly complicated statistics it is paradoxical that I believe in the validity of statistcs (handled honestly) while you base your position on things that aren't & you say can't be statistically proven. We have had 20 years of very fine sifting of every possibility & if it is impossible to find any excess deaths by now it is because they aren't there. There is no theoretical reason to believe that the medical effects of Chernobyl will only start to kick in after 25/40/60/100 years.

By comparison since there has been absolutely no research on my theory that organic tomatoes kill on sight more & better research is required. The precautionary principle requires the immediate banning of such tomatoes.

You have again simply not read what I wrote above and you have certainly not checked the references I gave you. My comment was drawn form a number of sources, some sympathetic to the nuclear industry and certainly not all from Greenpeace.

The fact remains that the IAEA report deliberately understated the probable death toll from Chernobyl.

One of the most experienced researchers into the Chernobyl disaster has broken his silence to warn European leaders that flirting with nuclear power "is folly of the first order".

The views of Yuri Bandazhevsky have cost him his reputation as one of the former Soviet Union's most respected scientists and earned him a five-year stint as a prisoner of conscience in Belarus, where contradicting the government line is always a risk…An investigation by 100 scientists acting under the auspices of nine United Nations bodies and published last year said that fewer than 50 people died as an immediate result of the accident. It said that the eventual number of deaths attributable to longer-term radiation was unlikely to exceed 9,000…

Mr Bandazhevsky, too, rejected the UN study. "The authors want to draw a line under Chernobyl," he said. "The report humiliates the people who suffered from this catastrophe."

Mr Bandazhevsky said that vital information had been suppressed first by the Soviet authorities then by the Belarussian government. The figures did not include non-cancerous diseases, such as heart disorders and birth defects, caused by exposure to low doses of caesium-137. He also challenged the methods used in the study…

He believes that trying to calculate the number of fatalities caused by Chernobyl is futile.

"It is impossible to conclude with certainty that someone died from a cancer caused by smoking or by radiation," he said. "Just as you can't tell if heart disease was caused by radiation or alcohol."

However, that did not mean that there was no evidence, he said. Cardiovascular diseases in Belarus were the highest in Europe, nearly three times as high as in Britain.

In the past few weeks four major scientific reports have challenged the World Health Organisation (WHO), which believes that only 50 people have died and 9,000 may over the coming years. The reports widely accuse WHO of ignoring the evidence and dismissing illnesses that many doctors in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus say are worsening, especially in children of liquidators.

The charge is led by the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, which last week declared that 212,000 people have now died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl. Meanwhile, a major report commissioned by Greenpeace considers the evidence of 52 scientists and estimates the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers already and perhaps 100,000 deaths in time. A further report for European parliamentarians suggested 60,000 deaths. In truth no one knows.

Your initial statement was that some of your sources were "sympathetic to the nuclear industry" which is not the same as saying that, in debate, they do not always entirely censor the nuclear case.

I accept that you are claiming that the BBC & Nature are generaslly sympathetic to nuclear but then I also have that this is a ridiculous claim. At least you no longer claim the Guardian makes any attempt at balance.

As regards the Telegraph's improbable tale about the scientist imprisoned by Belarus for hyping the radiation threat (in fact belarus has been hyping for years to get aid), may I draw your attention to his statement you posted:

"He believes that trying to calculate the number of fatalities caused by Chernobyl is futile."

I think we are back in kill on sight organic tomato territory again.

You are doubtless unaware that cardiovascular disease is worse in Scotland than England too. You will now doubtless startspending your time protesting about how we have also been the victims of a conspiracy to infect us with undetectable radiation too.

Well, I am starting to realise that you genuinely do not know what you are talking about. You state above:

…The fact remains that that the IAEA report had deliberately overstated the death toll from Chernobyl. This is proven by the fact that 4,000 is a higher number than 50…

The IAEA report states:

“Three population categories were exposed from theChernobyl accident:

— Emergency and recovery operation workers who worked at the Chernobyl power plant and in the exclusion zone after the accident; — Inhabitants evacuated from contaminated areas; and — Inhabitants of contaminated areas who were not evacuated.”

The figure of 50 is the number of deaths that can be directly attributed to the Chernobyl accident. These deaths are from the first category, the emergency workers, who received the highest doses of radiation. These deaths can be directly linked to the incident because they exhibit the signs of acute radiation syndrome. The IAEA report says that 50 people died that way.

The fun begins when you try to compute how many people died overall. The draft version of the UN's Chernobyl Forum suggested up to 4,000 deaths could be linked to the incident. This figure was based on the 600,000 people exposed to high levels of radiation. The full report suggested another 5,000 of the 6.8 million people exposed to lower levels would also die. So the IAEA report is saying that 4,000 to 9,000 people will die as a result of Chernobyl.

However, the IAEA themselves admit that their figures are conservative. Other scientists, reflected in the range of opinions I have quoted, have argued that a wider range of diseases should be considered, that the fallout affected all of Europe so that wider geographical area should be factored in and that the original Russian records were falsified to minimise deaths. Hence the repeated opinion that different studies are measuring different things and that the “true figure” will never be known.

What is certain is that the IAEA report is clearly the lowest figure and even they say that a damn sight more than 50 people have died and will die as a result of one nuclear power station accident.

Once again you are wrong.The 50 does not only include emergency workers it includes 3 childhood leukemia deaths from a statistically verifiable increase in such.

There is zero statistical evidence of any other increase in illness (cancers, heart attacks, poisonous ingrowing toenails,crocodile attacks in Africa etc) as the quote from your previous posting acknowledged. As I have previously pointed out prodigious efforts have been made to look for such an increase. Indeed this failure of 100s of thousands of people to die on demand is very strong evidence that the LNT theory is wrong & the hormesis theory correct.

What is certain is that there is no more actual evidence for anything above 50 deaths than for the organic tomato, or indeed witchcraft, threat.

Firstly, my source of the 50 figure is page 14 of Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts: The Chernobyl Forum: 2003–2005, Second revised version which talks only about emergency workers and states “Among the general population exposed to the Chernobyl radioactive fallout, however, the radiation doses were relatively low, and ARS and associated fatalities did not occur.” So perhaps you could give us the source for your comment that the 50 “includes 3 childhood leukemia deaths from a statistically verifiable increase in such.”

But this really pales into insignificance with your assertion that there is no proof of any other deaths at all. On the basis that all the studies quoted so far believe that there is statistical evidence for deaths from conditions other that ARS, what is your evidence that there have been none?

The childhood leukemia increase is weel known however try < http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html > About 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the time of the accident, have resulted from the accident’s contamination and at least nine children died of thyroid cancer; however the survival rate among such cancer victims, judging from experience in Belarus, has been almost 99%. " (presuamably the statistical expectation would have been 6).

As regards there being no proof of other deaths (& in serious debate one would expect the person making such claims to be the one prodcing the evidence) may I point you to;

"Our problem is that there is no accepted methodology to calculate the numbers of people who might have died from such diseases," Greenpeace campaigner Jan van de Putte &"He believes that trying to calculate the number of fatalities caused by Chernobyl is futile."

Quoted, with approval by somebody whose opinions you presumably respect since it was yourself earlier here.

leads to a press release summary of the Chernobyl Forum Report already discussed. This states, on page 2:

“The total number of deaths already attributable to Chernobyl or expected in the future over the lifetime of emergency workers and local residents in the most contaminated areas is estimated to be about 4000. This includes some 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome and nine children who died of thyroid cancer, and an estimated total of 3940 deaths from radiation-induced cancer and leukemia among the 200 000 emergency workers from 1986-1987, 116 000 evacuees and 270 000 residents of the most contaminated areas (total about 600 000).”

So, on the basis of the fact that 9 is a different number from 3 and that the leukaemia deaths are not included in the total for emergency workers, you seem to have made a fairly fundamental error of fact. You also seem unwilling to accept the validity of the figure of 3940 other deaths estimated by this report (not to mention the further 5000 deaths from lower exposure to radiation noted in the full report).

Add in a couple of silly debating points and a deliberate misrepresentation of my earlier comments and your argument ends up as a crude denial of any evidence you find inconvenient.

"You also seem unwilling to accept the validity of the figure of 3940 other deaths estimated "

Well spotted. that is exactly what I have been telling you. The estimates are entirely based on the LNT theory which is contradicted by nnumerous facts & supported by none.

There is, as demonstrated in quotes you have intorduced here, no actual evidence of mass cancer (or indeed heart attack or crocodile attack) deaths which can be linked to chernobyl.

Next time you post I will expect you to either produce such evidence or retract.

The difference between 9 & 3 childhood leukemias would seem to be due to the fact that childhood leukemia occasionally happens everywhere. 6 such deaths in Belarus & northern Ukraine (totla pop about 15 million) would have been expected even if chernobyl had been a flour mill.

I believe the report has misstated & the 3 deaths are included within the 50 - indeed that the known worker deaths are well under 50 - to be reduced from claiming 90,000 dead to scrabbling over 3 is quite a drop.

So,as I have already said...your argument ends up as a crude denial of any evidence you find inconvenient. After all "...The estimates are entirely based on the LNT theory which is contradicted by numerous facts & supported by none." is nothing but a assertion backed by no evidence.

Well, you did not make it clear then that your Taiwan apartment block story was intended to be anything more than an amusing anecdote. I did not realise you were betting the farm on it.

Theories of radiation hormesis are controversial and no major regulatory body has rejected the LNT theory.

With regard to your Taiwan story:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/07/1081326798332.html notes that “Australia's nuclear watchdog, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, was sceptical yesterday. "There are several flaws in the Taiwan study," said Peter Burns, director of environmental and radiation health. "A proper epidemiological study would compare the exposed population to a similar population, not the Taiwan average, as cancer rates can vary markedly in any society," Dr Burns said.

Further, "because the exposure has only recently stopped, cancer rates would be expected to increase over the next 20 to 30 years, so that a long-term follow-up is required to be sure that the rates have not increased."”

seems to indicate that the Taiwan study was drawn up by scientists working for Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council as part of a law suit for negligence that the AEC lost.

As to the theory of radiation hormesis in general see:

http://www.gfstrahlenschutz.de/docs/hormeng2.pdf

which states that there is no credible evidence for hormesis “ All the “proofs” and “studies”…[cited]…represent either misleading or invalid interpretations of flawed epidemiological studies.”

As to “dishonesty”, I realise that you are using this in a specialised sense of “having the ability to demonstrate that Neil Craig cannot quote his own sources correctly” and, as such, represents the highest standard of honesty in debate of which you are capable.

Ultimately you can believe what you want but you should recognise that you are in the realms of faith, not science.

That you cannot tell the difference between a scientific paper & an "amusing" anecdote says quite a lot (amusing is a strange word to use of people failing to die in the expected manner).

Anyone reading the Australian rematks can see thet they are just trying to rubbish an inconvenient result. it is reminiscent of an explanation by Sir Humphrey Applebey of how to muddy waters in a particular Yes Minister episode. If they felt a control group study was required they could, of course, undertake one. In fact a result of a 97% decrease in cancer, compared to the population, is so spectacular that it is clear something has happened. There is no reason, theoretical or practical, to believe that a 97% reduction in cancer over the 20 years when people were subjectsd to radiation will automatically lead to a massive increase in the next 20. when they aren't. as nearly 5 years have now passed I am unsurprised that Mr Burns has not reported on such an increase now happening.

The mailman link makes a minor refernce to a case that this radioactivity should have been recognised years previously (correctly if what is said is true). This is completely separate to the case of cancer rates. the article does not suggest, as you imply, that the scientists paper is fraudulent. You are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

As you will have found all other official bodies (including your last link) have taken the safer course of ignoring the evidence & hoping it will go away.

I still await your apology for your claim that I what I said about hormesis was backed by "no evidence". I also await your continuing search for some detailed criticism of this scientific study, or indeed any actual evidence in favour of the LNT theory with interest. I imagine you are as surprised at its non-existence, as I once was. with interest.

I have also been sent the undernoted together with an opinion of "anonymous". I was aware of this & other cases in general terms but thanks for the specific.*********************************************************************************

A-bomb survivors are living longer on the average than unexposed Japanese

A-bomb survivors who had large doses - greater than the equivalent of 150 years of background - had a slight increase in cancer. In the last 50 years there was an average of fewer than 10 radiation induced cancer deaths per year in about 100,000 A-bomb survivors. A-bomb survivors who received a dose less than the equivalent of 60 years of background showed no increase in the incidence of cancer. Survivors in that dose range tended to be healthier than the unexposed Japanese. That is, their death from all causes was lower than for the unexposed Japanese. The improved health of those with low doses more than compensated for the radiation induced cancer deaths so that A-bomb survivors as a group are living longer on the average than the unexposed Japanese controls.

Nuclear shipyard workers were much healthier than non-nuclear shipyard workers

Evidence for health benefits from low dose rate radiation comes from the nuclear shipyard workers study (NSWS) a decade ago.10 This DOE sponsored study found that 29,000 nuclear shipyard workers with the highest cumulative doses had slightly less cancer than 33,000 job matched and age matched controls. The decreased cancer among nuclear workers was not statistically significant. However, the low death rate from all causes for the nuclear workers was statistically very significant. Nuclear workers had a death rate 24% (16 standard deviations) lower than the unexposed control group. If the nuclear workers had a death rate 24% higher than the controls, it would have made the world news in 1988.

I have now read the 3rd link which "anonymous" assured me answered the specific Taiwan case.

It isn't mentioned. What it amounts to is that the evidence doesn't count, with the exception of radiation hormesis in laboratory cultures which has been known about for a century & is repeatable in a way human cases aren't.

This incidentally is why the Taiwan case is important. Since the level of radioactivity & the occupants in all the apartments at any time is known it is as close to a laboratory experiment as can ever be done with humans.

The reason it doesn't count is that reload the figures, put in any new factor you can think of & don't count what you don't, put in your own secret algorithms & you can rejig them to fit. Of course by this method you can rejig black to white or produce the hockeystick theory of global warming.

I have emailed the authors to ask if they actually have anything to say about the Taiwan case. we will see.

Well, well, you’re cracking up boy! Censoring my last comment in it’s entirety and again attempting to restate my argument in your own terms to rubbish it.

My censored comment pointed out that, had you bothered to actually check it, the link led to a document in English. Now you have read it the result is yet more blather and denial.

Anyone who cares to follow the thread above will see that my link was not quoted as an answer to your Taiwan case but as a rebuttal of “the theory of radiation hormesis in general”, something it does quite well. Certainly your Angelfire link is little more than a reading list in comparison.

However, credit where credit is due. Dr Mortazavi is presumably an Iranian Muslim. If that is the case then it’s the first time on your entire site that you have approved of anything said or done by Muslims.

So once again you have not withdrawn the claim that I never mentioned hormesis before this . Thus once again I have to accept that that claim deliberately represents the very highest standard of honesty of which you are capable despite it being a lie.

I do not feel that I have any obligation to provide space for you to swear at me which is why the last post was not put up.

I may have your word that your link rubbishes hormesis "quite well" despite the fact that it accepts the laboratory evidence & refuses to discuss the strongest human evidence. I do not have to accept your word.

The last point is a silly non-sequiter & a sign of your desperation. It is also another lie.

Islam has not been previously mentioned here. Dr Mortazavi could be a Zoroastran, or Bihai, or Christian or Jewish - you clearly know absolutely nothing about him. If not he would not have been the first Islamist of whom I have approved here - Fikret Abdic was such an individual & I have correctly favourably compared historic Moslem treatment of Jews with historic Christian,

I must insist that in future you confine yourself to things for which you produce evidence & no swearing.

I personally would have allowed the swearing by anonymous just to prove how desperately impotent anonymous' assertions (note I didn't say "arguments") have become.

I also find it quite humorous how he splits hairs and engages in specious comments (i.e., diversions/evasiveness) about "my link was not quoted as an answer to your Taiwan case but as a rebuttal of “the theory of radiation hormesis in general”".

But yet in anonymous' previous comment he responded to your bringing up the Taiwan apartment block case as evidence of radiation hormesis with this remark: "Try reading the last link. You have not refuted it. You are again engaging in bluster and denial."

So, he himself is implying this last link of his as being a rebuttal of the Taiwan case by saying "look at the last link".

How all of this is relevant to & 'proves' that 4,000 to 9,000 (or 93,000 to 200,000 according to GreenPeace's religion) will die/have died from Chernobyl and that it is anti-Islamic to say that there is no proof for any of it is really beyond the joke. Does anonymous also work for the Guardian?

Oh yes, how silly of me, I do apologize: I forgot that the Guardian recently had to fire one of its "impartial" so-called "journalists" who turned out to be an Islamist terrorist.